Sub menu

Tag Archive for budget crisis

Well the numbers are in for the fiscal year ending June 2011 and it turns out Costa Mesa had a $3.8 million surplus. City officials had predicted a shortfall of $1.4 million earlier this year. But what’s a $5.2 million difference among friends?

Adam Elmahrek of The Voice of OC has looked over the wall of silence erected around City Hall to reveal a frightening image of a city in the midst of financial disaster. It is beyond puzzling how the City of Santa Ana that in June supposedly closed a $13.6-million budget gap by “borrowing money from the liability and workers’ compensation reserves,” has found itself in such a dire position.

In the process of poking around to find out how the City engaged in a recruitment process for City Manager without any formal direction from the City Council I think I may have stumbled on to a systematic and possibly much bigger problem for the City as it tries to stop the hemorrhaging of its budget.

Enough already. It is time to stop blaming public employees for the budget shortfalls and stop representing their pensions as excessive and budget busting. Just because you keep repeating a lie over and over, does not make it any less of a lie.

George Skelton’s column in today’s Los Angele Times shatters some of the myths about the impact of public employees’ unions in California on the annual budget crisis.Â Skelton writes: “In truth, California’s budget nightmare stems from a devil’s brew of sins: lack of discipline on both spending and tax-cutting in the past; an outdated and…

Maybe something good is happening in Sacramento. Well, it is possible. Stranger things have happened; this is, after all, California. Much of this is what people have been asking for. Much of it is common sense. Much of it is likely to stir up a hornetâ€™s nest. It will be interesting to see how much…